The Department of Energy was hacked. Again. It is the second time this year that the DOE was the victim of a breach. The breach took place in, and it is believed that the personally identifiable information (PII) of 14,000 present and former employees was potentially compromised.

In both cases, because of the type of information affected, the hackers may have been doing little more than data mining for valuable-on-the-black-market PII. Or it could be the hackers were looking for more, like the ability to access data involving the critical infrastructure or national security stored on the organizations’ networks. We don’t know, and we won’t know, as Anthony DiBello, strategic partnerships manager, Guidance Software, pointed out to Sue Marquette Poremba in an email, without a complete forensic analysis of the compromised systems. He went on to say:

When incidents like this happen, people are very eager to get their systems and machines back online and working. This may cause serious loss to the forensic artifacts and the evidence to determine exactly what happened.

After a breach, DiBello added, an organization should take the time to learn what happened, and leverage the lessons learned to improve their systems. Otherwise, they may leave themselves vulnerable to another, similar attack. So DiBello provided the following tips on how to best manage breaches like this.

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